Even if retailers aren't on the internet yet, their customers expect them to be. With the expansion of mobile and the rise of e-commerce, 2012 is going to see a lot of development within the Web industry. Here are 11 Web industry predictions for 2012.

 

1. Companies will focus internally on mobile development. As the 2011 holiday shopping season has proven, the mobile Web is no longer a curiosity. Approximately 15% of online traffic came from mobile devices, more than double the previous year. Not only were these mobile shoppers spending money, they spent more on average — particularly shoppers using iPads — than desktop shoppers. Rather than keeping mobile on the sideline, retailers will grow their mobile teams to match the size and scope of their regular development teams.

 

2. Mobile consumer behavior will continue to evolve as mobile users' expectations grow. Marriott recently reported that 47% of its mobile bookings happen on the same day as check-in. Clearly, these users have developed the expectation that they can book on demand and on the go. They won't return to a poorly performing site — they'll bounce to another site that can give them what they want immediately. We're going to see more of this type of behavior, and retailers are going to have to adjust to the fact that mobile users are even more demanding than desktop users.

3. The average Web page will surpass 1 MB in size. Between January and November 2011, the average top 1,000 page grew from 716 KB to 929 KB, according to the HTTP Archive. That's 30% growth in slightly less than one year. This kind of growth is the norm, as pages have grown at a rapid rate since 1995, when the average page size was just 14.1 KB. We're going to see sites grow by at least another 30%, taking them over the 1 MB mark — a number that would have blown our minds 10 years ago. The main culprits: images (which account for more than half of the average page size) and third-party scripts like analytics, ads and social sharing widgets.

 

4. Site owners are going to demand more transparency and control over third-party content and scripts. The average top e-commerce site contains seven third-party scripts, and some sites have up to 25 scripts. Poorly optimized third-party scripts can slow down page load by several seconds or even stall it completely. Currently, most third-party script providers don't offer real-time monitoring of their scripts, nor do they offer meaningful service level agreements (SLAs). As retailers become increasingly educated about the importance of page speed, they're going to start demanding that scripts be properly optimized to either load asynchronously. They're also going to demand better monitoring, reporting and accountability from script providers.

 

5. Companies are going to start shining a spotlight on internal application performance. 2010 and 2011 marked the years when retailers realized how important site speed was for e-commerce sites. Now that everyone has internalized the fact that faster pages equal more revenue, they're going to take this insight and apply it to their internal Web-based applications. There are a lot of studies, dating back as far as 1968, showing that employees can radically increase their productivity — in some cases by more than double — when computer response time is improved by just two or three seconds. We're going to see a renaissance in this kind of research, and we're finally going to see retailers aggressively pursue improving internal performance.

 

6. Chrome will become the dominant browser. For the past year, we've seen Internet Explorer and Firefox slowly dropping in popularity, while Chrome's popularity has been rising steadily. Right now, IE is still dominant, and Chrome just passed Firefox. With Chrome set to unite with Android, which is as much a semantic merger as a technical one, we're going to see Chrome's numbers climb sharply.

 

7. Windows is going to surprise us on mobile. Everyone thinks it's an iOS/Android world, but that could all change when we see Windows 7 embedded in the next wave of Nokia devices. Remember how Internet Explorer blew Netscape out of the water back in the '90s? Windows 7 might not be a game changer to quite that extent, but we're going to see it become a contender in the mobile universe.

 

8. Amazon Silk is not going to spark a browser revolution. Everyone was excited when Amazon described Silk's so-called "split browser" design — the fact that Silk can offload complex browser tasks to Amazon's cloud, resulting in dramatically faster load times. The logical next question is: will there be any imitators among the other browser vendors? No, there won't, at least not in 2012. For starters, there are privacy concerns surrounding the fact that this kind of split architecture has the potential to capture private user data. And while Silk offers a performance boost for some tablet content, it is not meant to process and crunch a lot of heavy data. Basic optimization techniques — such as those embedded in Silk — can actually slow down, or even break, pages. Web pages are becoming even more complex, data-intensive and dynamic. Because of this, advanced content optimization — which takes a big-picture approach to accelerating the entire site — is increasingly emerging as the only reliable way to optimize sites without causing harm.

 

9. The CDN market is going to become a lot more competitive. Until recently, whole site acceleration or dynamic site acceleration (DSA) was a big-ticket solution offered by one company. Now there's a growing selection of competitive products backed by innovative companies offering newer technology and, ultimately, faster sites. The added value will keep prices and margins at reasonable rates. The big winners here are going to be savvy site owners, who could see their bills reduced and their service quality go up. 

 

10. Real user monitoring will make performance testing accessible to smaller, "mortal" companies. Performance testing is challenging. When synthetic tests were first developed, they came with a pretty major price tag, which meant they could only be embraced by site owners with deep pockets. With the recent proliferation of affordable, quality real user monitoring (RUM) tools, site owners will be able to finally get real insight into their visitors' behavior — at a decent price.

 

11. Google and Siri could begin a long face off. Google has become synonymous with search, and it would require a massive paradigm shift to dislodge them from this position. Siri is a potentially formidable contender. By taking users completely out of keyword-entry mode and by focusing on local search, Siri is incredibly attractive to mobile users, who are often task-oriented and on the move. But it all comes down to results. Google became dominant in search because it delivered the most relevant results and it delivered them fast. If Siri can do the same — and to be blunt, right now Siri kind of sucks — then it'll be interesting to see how Google responds.